Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected (opens in new tab)

I have a slightly different story, told by a Romanian coworker who was old enough to have worked in a factory under Ceaucescu: the workers stole from the factory, all the time, at every level. Managers would be able to take away complete items for "testing"; ordinary line workers would be limited to what parts they could plausibly conceal in their overalls at the end of the shift, then assemble them in their own time.

As someone who used to be a Pirate Party supporter, piracy has to exist in an equilibrium to avoid killing the host, and I don't know if that's possible on today's internet. Both "absurdly onerous DRM making the game unplayable, especially once abandoned" and "Rockstar spends $265m making the game, one person buys a copy, and everyone else pirates it" are bad outcomes. The optimal one is probably somewhere in the "a small number of people who Know A Guy pirate the game, gradually increasing over time" range. But that may not be sustainable either.

That assembly line workers are constantly being kept fresh on their skills and processes. If you can't get some component for 3 months, new units can almost immediately be pushed out of the factory when the component does arrive. If you bring on new workers, you train them on the disassembly process first and then move them onto the assembly line once they understand the construction.

The only downsides are paying the factory workers to spin their wheels and the 2x wear and tear on tools and replacement costs of any components damaged by the constant handling.

The US does something similar with the national defense manufacturers. We don't necessarily need more of a vehicle but if that factory sits dormant for 2 years until we do need replacements, it's going to take a long time to train workers. And you run a risk of losing any tribal knowledge those workers carried. You can lower production rates so you aren't buying too many things at once but keeping a small crew busy will allow you to quickly ramp production if necessary.

> they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days

Meanwhile the "pirates" enjoy a superior experience. They don't have to put up with this nonsense. They can use the devices they want. They can install the games on as many machines as they want. They can play the games offline. Their games are faster because there's no obfuscated nonsense code running. They don't have to suffer idiotic invasive kernel mode DRM nonsense on their computers, software whose only difference from literal malware is legal boilerplate in a document that nobody reads but that everybody theoretically accepted when they fast forwarded through the installation screens furiously clicking next so they could play the game they paid for.

Makes me feel like a total moron for buying games every single time.

The “keep up the appearance of working” story feels like a misleading comparison to me, because the motivations are pretty much reversed. In the hypothetical factory, there's an external social element requiring the appearance of working, some observer to whom it looks good that this is happening: the way I read it, the assemblers and disassemblers may well be cooperating with each other to produce that appearance, so that the absurdity is visible from within (though they could also just be unaware of each other's assigned tasks). In the case of anti-copying technologies, game publishers trying to guard their revenue stream, and other groups trying to distribute or play unauthorized copies, are adversaries whose tactics create relative losses for each other that can bleed into the surrounding society: seems bad that it impacts other users / risks jobs and livelihood / is various forms of unfair (depending on one's moral feelings around which actions are ‘justified’), but their individual actions are incentive-aligned from within the conflict.

I've heard that story (or a similar one) about Boeing on a cost-plus contract in the War; one group of employees would dump screws together, and the night shift would sort them apart.

the management must've forgot they literally gave gta 5 away on epic store like 5 years ago, lol.

If you notice, if you said is correct, this means it would be incredibly easy to yank your ownership of GTA 5 simply by retiring denuvo related account.

All that would be publicised would be " GTA 5 denuvo key license is now over" and people would not know

GTA V got a major update last year that included eg DLSS support. It would perhaps make sense if the DRM changed at that point?

Denuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release. Something like 60 to 80% of a game’s revenue is during that period. They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked, and they absolutely do not care about performance.

The bigger problem with Denuvo is that it appears to significantly impact game performance as well

I would hope that users would just refuse to buy games that use Denuvo and similar malware. I do, but I know most users don't care.

Why would they care for a few hundred MBs when the games are in the 10s of GBs?

Remove DRM and let buyers suffer less? Crazy talk.

Denuvo’s market is ‘first 90 days’ revenue protection, not lifelong revenue protection. Lots of games using their crap remove it after a few months to shut down the flood of support issues the DRM causes. If only Microsoft hadn’t fucked up so badly with Windows 11 requiring an account, they’d have a way to stop using it altogether.

I honestly doubt it will make much of a difference.

A good percentage of people who would download the cracked games would not have bought those anyway. And with Steam being so convenient it's hard to decide to go for a cracked copy of dubious origin that might install god knows what into your machine.

We're not in the early 00s anymore.

> performance and stability penalties

There are none. Or rather they fall in the margin of error.

i think your underwstimating the anticheat value that still exists. many of the online games are trash when theres not strict cheat control.

Right where I've landed as well. I just won't buy titles with Denuvo DRM, ever, no matter how much I want the game.

Was pleasantly surprised to find Doom Eternal is now on GOG a couple of days ago. If you're willing to wait, some AAA titles show up that previously had draconian DRM.

I'm willing to buy on Steam, however not with intrusive DRM. Nor with 3rd party store requirements (like EA games on Steam).

E.G. I'd like to own a copy of the modern Persona games. I'm in no particular rush. If the studios want my money when they're on sale for like 50% off launch price, gain some profit per sale and additional sales by axing the useless DRM.

Surprisingly, there were DRM games praised for good UX, only these were hardware releases.

When Switch 1 launched, it got re-releases (eg: Diablo 3) that were: 1. complete editions with DLCs, 2. came on a cartridge that one could swap between devices or sell, 3. supported offline play.

Online game stores were supposed to offer better UX than hardware releases. I find it interesting, and perhaps a sign of how bad the online experience can get, that the opposite can happen too.

Likewise, I will not even consider paying for games (or music) that don't have an unencumbered download option. If the game is open source I will usually buy it without even thinking very hard about whether I'll play it.

Generally any game you can buy on GoG is also DRM free on Steam. I mention since many people have the incorrect notion that all Steam games have DRM

What games that are on GOG without DRM have DRM on, say, Steam? (Many Steam games have no DRM.)

Wanna play AAA games? Live with Denuvo et al.

The main difference that Denuvo does nothing to improve the experience of the end user.

I don't like Anti-Cheat solutions with elevated privileges but they have (at least for some time) reduced the number of Cheaters in games like Valorant or BF, for most users this is at least a somewhat understandable tradeoff. Denuvo on the other hand is DRM and a pure tradeoff in favor of the publisher at the cost of the consumed.

There is a user argument for anti cheat as a user = less cheater.

There is no user argument for DRM, if anything there are many against it = higher game price/less money for the actual game and devs, indirect funding of DRM software, worse performance, higher system requirements, worse preservation, worse privacy, longer loading times, online requirements, worse usability, machine activation restriction, bugs...

How are you protecting yourself at the game itself spying on you?

All software piracy is a security risk since they could embed malware in the game.

Cracking refers to all methods of circumventing copy protection. Bypassing is just another way of cracking something.

Info from veeery long ago because I have been out of this stuff for over a decade:

The release will have an .sfv file with a CRC32 checksum for each rar file.

The FTP server checks them after the upload completes. Back in the day glftpd with zipscript was a very popular tool to manage an FTP site. This Readme sums it up well: https://github.com/pzs-ng/pzs-ng

The sfv can be tampered with but the propagation of releases to FTPs happens very fast, within minutes. It would take you longer to meaningfully alter it than it takes the racers to distribute the original files. And once the release is completely uploaded you can't modify the files anymore.

If the release is bad, for example if it doesn't work at all or if it contains a virus, then it simply gets nuked. This propagates within minutes.

It's not a scene release. You know a release isn't tainted when you grab it from the source...

There's a yellow? box just above payment options that informs you of DRM.

Yes they are. On the store page.

steamdb.info should have the info too I think?

Yeah, the headline is sensational and the body of the article doesn't do enough to distinguish between the bypass and a real crack. They only resemble one another only in the most shortsighted of ways.

One big difference is that the bypass method _requires_ Microsoft Windows in order to function. You cannot use the bypass on Linux.

I don't have a Windows install anywhere, so if I want to play the game I have to either purchase it, or wait for a crack that will remove Denuvo from the executable.

I get this probably doesn't matter to most people because they're on Windows anyway and will happily disable whatever security is required to access free games, but it's disappointing to have the technical distinctions and broader implications glossed over.

This. It's bypassed, not cracked. All the games released need HVB to work. They use legit Denuvo licenses from other systems.

That already is how it works. Denuvo can not authenticate your game without internet access.

> You may not immediately be able to figure out what the call/response is, but without knowing what the check is, it could just be a simple endpoint that returns "true" on every request. Very speculative to say that whatever they do will be impossible to mimic.

It’s trivially easy to use a signed response that is encoding some part of the metadata of your system in the signature to make it impossible to emulate the server. Don’t think the Denuvo devs would be stupid enough to provide a “return true” request for a server call.

Can the underlying function that checks if the server call is correct be bypassed? Sure, but that’s much harder.

Cryptography goes BRRRRR, with a proper implementation of cryptography you'd need to do things like patch out the keys in memory in order to "spoof" messages.

Denuvo is owned by Irdeto, a digital rights management company in a broad sense. They not only do software and hardware DRM, but also work as a watchdog for movie and music companies to claim DMCA violations for BitTorrent, among all other stuff.

“A friend of mine” told me that disabling hyper V and all that stuff is needed to play Crimson Desert cracked version.

> "Restricted" is much more honest regarding what Denovo does.

I'd suggest "encumbered" or even "infected".

I only know of the one text file MKDEV added to their Persona bypass: https://pastebin.com/hps67mkh

Tough to decide who I trust less, denuvo or a ring-0 hypervisor I downloaded off BitTorrent.